A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

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Tag: D.C. Circuit

A year ago this coming Sunday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ordered the Transportation Security Administration to do a notice-and-comment rulemaking on its use of Advanced Imaging Technology (aka “body-scanners” or “strip-search machines”) for primary screening at airports. (The alternative for those who refuse such treatment: a prison-style pat-down.) It was a very important ruling, for reasons I discussed in a post back then. The TSA was supposed to publish its policy in the Federal Register, take comments from the public, and issue a final rule that responds to public input.

So far, it hasn’t done any of those things.

The reason for the delay, stated in a filing with the court last year, was the complexity and expense of doing a rulemaking in this area. But CEI’s Ryan Radia, at work on a legal brief in the case, notes that the TSA has devoted substantial resources to the PreCheck program during this time, rolling it out to additional airports. How can an agency pour resources into its latest greatest project yet claim poverty when it comes to complying with the law?

By the end of the day yesterday, the petition had garnered the 150 signatures needed to get it published on Whitehouse.gov. The petition says:

Defying the court, the TSA has not satisfied public concerns about privacy, about costs and delays, security weaknesses, and the potential health effects of these machines. If the government is going to “body-scan” Americans at U.S. airports, President Obama should force the TSA to begin the public process the court ordered.

That’s not a huge request. Getting 25,000 signatures requires the administration to supply a response, according to the White House’s petition rules.

The response we want is legal compliance. The public deserves to know where the administration stands on freedom to travel, and the rule of law. While TSA agents bark orders at American travelers, should the agency itself be allowed to flout one of the highest courts in the land? If the petition gets enough signatures, we’ll find out.

Signing the petition requires an email for confirmation, but it does not sign you up for any mailing list unless you volunteer for that. If you’re quite concerned about sharing an email, you can create a throwaway email on AOL or Yahoo! and use it once.

Please pass the word about the petition. If it gets to 25,000 people, the Obama administration will owe the public a response. I’ll report on it, and whether or not it’s satisfactory, right here.

Today the D.C. Circuit ruled that the individual mandate is a constitutional exercise of federal power under the Commerce Clause. Senior Judge Laurence Silberman (Reagan appointee) wrote the opinion, which was joined by Senior Judge Harry Edwards (Carter appointee). Judge Brett Kavanaugh (George W. Bush appointee) dissented on jurisdictional grounds without reaching the merits, finding that the Anti-Injunction Act barred the suit until the individual mandate/penalty/tax goes into effect. (The case is Seven-Sky v. Holder; see Cato’s amicus brief and a quick breakdown by Tim Sandefur.)

Sure, this is a loss for our side but it’s not a big deal. Every development in the Obamacare litigation has been anticlimactic since the Eleventh Circuit split with the Sixth, guaranteeing that the Supreme Court would take the case. Today’s ruling, therefore, is notable not so much for its result – upholding the individual mandate – as for the reluctance with which it reached it.

After acknowledging the novelty of the power Congress is asserting, the court expressed concern at “the Government’s failure to advance any clear doctrinal principles limiting congressional mandates that any American purchase any product or service in interstate commerce.” In other words, the majority saw itself bound by the Supreme Court’s broad reading of federal power under the Commerce Clause but felt “discomfort” at reaching a result that seemingly had no bounds.

Indeed, the government has yet to tell any court in any of the cases what it cannot do under the guise of regulating interstate commerce. But rest assured that the Supreme Court will ask again, and soon – it considers the myriad cert petitions later this week. And if the high court is as unsatisfied with the government’s jurisprudential non-theory as the D.C. Circuit was, it will not hesitate to strike down this expansion of federal power.

“Federalism is more than an exercise in setting the boundary between different institutions of government for their own integrity,” wrote Justice Kennedy for a unanimous Court last term (United States v. Bond). “Federalism secures the freedom of the individual.”

I am confident that the Supreme Court will not allow this unprecedented invasion of individual liberty.

Developments in the Obamacare lawsuits are coming at us so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. After a month and a half of speculation on what the administration would do after it lost in the 26-state/NFIB lawsuit (Florida v. U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services), in the last week the D.C. Circuit heard argument in yet another case on appeal, the government decided not to seek en banc review in the Eleventh Circuit, yesterday we went from zero to three cert. petitions in that case, and the government filed a reply in the Thomas More (Sixth Circuit) case. Here’s a breakdown:

1. D.C. Circuit Argument

This past Friday, the D.C. Circuit heard the appeal of Seven-Sky v. Holder (in which Cato filed this brief). There wasn’t much media coverage, in part because the reporting came in on a Friday afternoon but more because the appellate developments after the Eleventh Circuit created a split from the earlier pro-government Sixth Circuit ruling are somewhat anticlimactic – because the action has moved to the Supreme Court. I attended the hearing and can report a few key points:

(a) The government still has not managed to come up with an example of something it cannot do under its reading of the Commerce Clause. This is shocking. Solicitor General Verrilli (who did not argue here), a word of unsolicited advice before Justice Scalia asks you the same question: come up with a couple of outlandish things and move on. Unless, you know, you think the government really can do anything it wants if a congressional majority exists for it.

(b) Judge Bret Kavanaugh, Bush II appointee and rising star in the conservative judicial establishment, had some serious concerns regarding the Anti-Injunction Act (the jurisdictional issue on which the Fourth Circuit based its decision to dismiss the Liberty University case). Beth Brinkmann, arguing for the government and after floundering on the Commerce Clause (see above), seemed to have done a great job in putting Kavanaugh’s mind at ease – or at least getting him over the jurisdictional hump.

(c) Judge Laurence Silberman, Reagan appointee and author of many significant opinions over the years, has a really wide interpretation of government power under Wickard v. Filburn, the 1942 wheat-farming case. I’m not sure that puts his vote in danger – he was also the one who most went after the government – but it does raise an eyebrow.

(d) Overall, I cautiously predict a 2-1 ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, but we won’t know till later this fall. For a more detailed analysis of the hearing, see Randy Barnett’s post at the Volokh Conspiracy.

2. No En Banc Review in the Eleventh Circuit

On Monday, the government allowed the deadline for seeking review of the Eleventh Circuit panel ruling by the full court to slip. Commentators, including myself, had speculated that it might file for en banc review in an attempt to push the inevitable Supreme Court ruling past the 2012 election. That didn’t happen, and here was my press statement:

En banc rehearing would have been legally futile and politically damaging, so the government made the correct decision in not seeking it. We can now expect the solicitor general to ask the Supreme Court to review the Eleventh Circuit’s decision to strike down the individual mandate while leaving the rest of Obamacare standing. The certainty that such review will provide to a nation battered by this among so many other pieces of economically harmful administration policies cannot come soon enough.

The government’s inactivity here, as it were, provoked a flurry of coverage. I agree with the analysis that Peter Suderman put up at Reason.

3. NFIB Files Cert. Petition

Early yesterday (Wednesday) morning, the National Federation of Independent Business and two individuals asked the Supreme Court to review the one issue on which they lost before the Eleventh Circuit: severability. That is, despite the government’s concession that at least the community-rating and guaranteed-issue provisions are inextricably tied to the individual mandate, and the obvious practical observation that none of the legislation would’ve passed without the mandate, the Eeleventh Circuit reversed Judge Vinson’s ruling on this point and only struck down the mandate. The petition also makes the point that the Eleventh Circuit case presents the best Supreme Court “vehicle” among all the lawsuits because it most cleanly presents the relevant issues and doesn’t face lingering concerns over standing. It’s a strong and aggressively worded brief which makes for a good read. Here was my press statement:

The NFIB’s cert petition forces the Supreme Court to grapple not simply with the individual mandate’s constitutional defects but with the fatal flaws those defects expose in the overall legislation. The regulatory burden and economic uncertainty – let alone direct financial cost – that Obamacare imposes on individuals, businesses, states, and the nation as a whole are part and parcel of a noxious scheme centered on the individual mandate. The Court should grant this petition and thus begin putting an end to the government’s doomed – and unconstitutional – attempt to control our lives.

Randy Barnett, who’s now part of the NFIB legal team (which is led by veteran appellate litigator Mike Carvin), has this useful post about the petition’s treatment of the Anti-Injunction Act.

4. 26 States File Cert. Petition

On the heels of the NFIB filing, the 26 states in the Florida-led lawsuit filed their own cert. petition yesterday. “Time is of the essence,” lead counsel (and former solicitor general) Paul Clement argues. “States need to know whether they must adapt their policies to deal with the brave new world ushered in by the ACA.” The petition asks the Court to review three questions:

(a) Does the threat to withhold all Medicaid funding if states don’t agree to Obamacare’s onerous new conditions on that program constitute impermissible coercion by the federal government? [The Eleventh Circuit said no.]

(b) May Congress treat states no differently from any other employer when imposing invasive mandates as to the manner in which they provide their own employees with insurance coverage? [This is a new formulation of a claim that hasn’t gotten much attention, and focuses on the somewhat idiosyncratic 1985 Supreme Court decision in Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority.]

(c) Does the individual mandate exceed federal power and, if so, can it be severed from the rest of the law?

I’ve only skimmed this petition, but it too is a hard-hitting and elegant presentation of serious issues.

5. Solicitor General Files Cert. Petition

Around lunchtime yesterday, the government filed its own cert. petition. (The parties were all clearly playing a high-stakes game of legal chicken; once the govenment declined to pursue en banc review, the NFIB incorporated that fact into a petition that it had clearly been considering filing preemptively, its co-plaintiff states soon followed, and the government’s hand was forced to throw its petition – which had obviously also been in the final stages – into the filing cascade. Note that yesterday was not any sort of deadline for seeking Supreme Court review!)

The new solicitor general, Donald Verrilli, of course asks the Court to address whether the individual mandate is constitutional, but also, curiously, whether the challenges are barred by the Anti-Injunction Act. On this second point, the government argues that the AIA does not apply but asks the Court to appoint an amicus to argue that it does, effectively to defend the Fourth Circuit’s position. This is unusual. The SG is essentially saying that he would prefer to win on the merits but will accept a technical victory so long as he doesn’t have to argue for it. (This accords with my prediction that the Court will either rule for the plaintiffs or find a procedural way of avoiding the merits while allowing the individual mandate to stand.)

6. Government Responds to Thomas More’s Cert. Petition

There was one actual deadline yesterday, and the government met it: It filed a response (not labeled “opposition” as is typically the case) to the cert petition in Thomas More Law Center v. Obama, the case coming out of the Sixth Circuit. As expected given its earlier filing, the government asked the Court to hold this petition pending resolution of Florida v. HHS. There’s really nothing to this filing beyond expressing that position.

Conclusion

The day we’ve all been awaiting since President Obama signed his health care law in March 2010 – the Supreme Court’s ruling – is nigh. Normally the parties on the other side of cert. petitions have 30 days to respond, after which the Court considers the filings, issues a cert. grant or denial (here a grant of some kind), and sets the case for argument a few months in the future to allow time for briefing on the merits. In Florida v. HHS, however, all the parties – the government, the states, the NFIB/individual plaintiffs – are requesting cert., so I’m not sure what value they or the Court would get from responsive filings (which would be due Oct.27). Regardless of that wrinkle, the Court is likely to grant cert. sometime in November – or in any case by the end of the year – and set argument for March or April.

So we’re on track for a decision that glorious last week of June when the Court releases its most pressing opinions and gets the heck out of Dodge.

Last week, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a Fourth Amendment challenge to the Transportation Security Administration’s strip-search machine policies, but it found that the TSA violated the Administrative Procedure Act in rolling them out. Too bad that the court arrived at the Fourth Amendment issues before they were ripe.

The bulk of the decision was devoted to the TSA’s law violation in creating strip-search machine policies without doing a notice-and-comment rulemaking. That’s the procedure federal agencies are required to carry out when Congress has delegated them legislative authority. Congress did delegate such authority when it told the Department of Homeland Security to develop technologies that detect nonmetallic, chemical, biological, and radiological weapons in 2004’s Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act.

“[T]he TSA has advanced no justification for having failed to conduct a notice-and-comment rulemaking,” the court wrote, adding that it expects the agency “to act promptly on remand to cure the defect in its promulgation.”

The TSA will likely spout “constantly changing threat environment” boilerplate to try and argue that it can avoid notice and comment under the APA’s “good cause” exception. An agency can skip notice and comment “when the agency for good cause finds … that notice and public procedure thereon are impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest.”

But the threat environment is not “constantly changing” at the level of abstraction relevant for the strip-search machine policy—some people are out there who might try to get dangerous articles onto planes—and these machines will be in place for decades, if not permanently, under the TSA policy. They will affect the privacy and security of billions of air passenger journeys. Even if there were need for haste in rolling out the machines, nothing makes it uniquely difficult, or anything other than appropriate, for the TSA to engage in a public process to substantiate its actions.

When the TSA does a rulemaking, it will have to lay out its strip-search machine policies and—crucially—justify them. Notice-and-comment rules are subject to court review, and reversal if they are “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.” That is a rather low standard, but it’s a higher standard than the agency has ever met before—none at all.

The TSA will have to exhibit how its risk management supports the installation and use of strip-search machines. How did the TSA do its asset characterization (summarizing the things it is protecting)? What are the vulnerabilities it assessed? How did it model threats and hazards (actors or things animated to do harm)? What are the likelihoods and consequences of various attacks? Risk assessment questions like these are all essential inputs into decisions about what to prioritize and how to respond.

Congress dictated detection of various harmful agents, a form of interdiction. (The other responses to risk are acceptance, prevention, and mitigation.) Given the array of choices available to it, how did the TSA select strip-search machines?

Crucially, how well do strip-search machines reach the risks identified in their risk assessment? This is a cost-benefit question. How much do strip-search machines cost to purchase, maintain, and operate? The costs denominated in dollars include money spent on buying the machines, configuring airports, and paying TSA salaries to operate the machines and process passengers. Such costs also include opportunity costs imposed on travelers when the time they spend at airports lengthens to accommodate extended security screening and variable delays. Yet more costs are denominated in lost privacy and dignity to the traveler. These are substantial, though hard to quantify.

Watch in the rulemaking for the TSA to obfuscate, particularly in the area of threat, using claims to secrecy. “We can’t reveal what we know,” goes the argument. “You’ll have to accept our generalizations about the threat being ‘substantial,’ ‘ever-changing,’ and ‘growing.’” It’s an appeal to authority that works with much of the American public, but it is not one to which courts—a co-equal branch of the government—should so easily succumb.

If it sees it as necessary, the TSA should publish its methodology for assessing threats, then create a secret annex to the rulemaking record for court review containing the current state of threat under that methodology, and how the threat environment at the present time compares to threat over a relevant part of the recent past. A document that contains anecdotal evidence of threat is not a threat methodology. Only a way of thinking about threat that can be (and is) methodically applied over time is a methodology.

With this information in hand, a court would not only be ready to assess the TSA’s rule under the Administrative Procedure Act’s “arbitrary and capricious” standard. It would be ready to assess the reasonableness of the TSA’s strip-search machines and procedures under the Fourth Amendment.

Without that information, the D.C. Circuit plugged the strip-search machines into the strangely incoherent “administrative search” exception to the Fourth Amendment. In two pages of analysis (out of the opinion’s seventeen), the court found that strip-search machines are administrative “because the primary goal is not to determine whether any passenger has committed a crime but rather to protect the public from a terrorist attack.”

Come again?

It seems the court could have taken judicial notice that terrorist attacks are carried out through one or more criminal behaviors. People who have weapons or other dangerous articles at airport checkpoints are subject to arrest and prosecution. Crime control and public protection are one in the same, even in counterterrorism.

The “administrative search” exception to the Fourth Amendment seems to rest on the willingness of a court to abstract away the fact that individuals are prevented from proceeding where they would go (seized) while their persons, papers, and effects are rummaged (searched) for the purpose of discovering violations of the criminal laws. Earlier in the opinion, in fact, the court mocked the idea that the TSA might not “engage in ‘law enforcement, correctional, or intelligence activity.’” It surely does. This is not “administrative.” It’s criminal law enforcement.

Perhaps with a full record—a notice-and-comment rulemaking with a docket full of information and analysis—the D.C. Circuit and other courts will have the opportunity to revisit whether the TSA’s strip-search machine policies are constitutionally reasonble, or whether they’re unexamined reaction. Last week’s “loss” on the Fourth Amendment issue sets the stage for sounder thinking on the strip-search machine policy.

Today we filed Cato’s sixth brief supporting the various legal challenges to Obamacare, this time in the D.C. Circuit. Like Tom Joad, wherever the fight has been, we’ve been there, and now it’s in our backyard.

In February, Judge Gladys Kessler of the D.C. district court granted Congress the power to regulate “mental activity” in a decision that flippantly disregarded the core distinction between action and inaction: “Making a choice is an affirmative action, whether one decides to do something or not do something.” The frightening scope of that opinion has proven more harmful than helpful to the government, which has shifted its focus away from Kessler’s sweeping language by describing the mandate as merely a requirement that people pre-pay for the health care they will inevitably use.

Our latest brief deals more directly with that added nuance—even more so than the brief Cato filed two weeks ago. Due to a local circuit rule requiring amici with similar arguments to file jointly, Cato coordinated a brief involving six other organizations—Mountain States Legal Foundation, Pacific Legal Foundation, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Goldwater Institute, Revere America, and Idaho Freedom Foundation—as well as Prof. Randy Barnett.

Using Cato’s previous brief as a starting point, amici worked together to adjust our arguments in light of new ideas coming from both the government and academia. The core argument, however, remains the same: regardless of any linguistic contortions, the non-purchase of health care is fundamentally a non-economic inactivity that Congress cannot reach under the Commerce and Necessary and Proper Clauses.

Allowing Congress the power to conscript citizens into economic transactions not only goes beyond current precedent, but would give Congress a general and limitless police power to do whatever it thinks best, checked only by politics.

In addition to the doctrinal arguments we presented in previous briefs, here we remind the court that limiting Congress’s power is the explicit purpose of Article I of the Constitution and address the relationship of the individual mandate to United States v. Comstock, the most recent interpretation of the limits on federal power under the Necessary and Proper Clause (a case in which Cato also filed a brief, that Ilya Somin covered in our Supreme Court Review, and about Trevor Burrus and I recently published a law review article).

The D.C. Circuit will hear the case of Seven-Sky v. Holder in September. Given the state of litigation around the country, we will likely not be filing another Obamacare brief before the action reaches the Supreme Court—which it’s expected to later this year, after the first few circuit courts issue their rulings.

But the Open Internet Coalition put out a release containing threat exaggeration to make Dick Cheney blush:

“Today’s DC Circuit decision … creates a dangerous situation, one where the health and openness of broadband Internet is being held hostage by the behavior of the major telco and cable providers.”

That’s right. It’s a hostage-taking when consumers and businesses—and not government—hammer out the terms and conditions of Internet access. Inferentially, the organization representing Google, Facebook, eBay, and Twitter believes that Internet users are too stupid and supine to choose the Internet service they want.

What these content companies are really after, of course, is government support in their tug-of-war with the companies that transport Internet content. It’s hard to know which produces the value of the Internet and which should gain the lion’s share of the rewards. Let the market—not lobbying—decide what reward content and transport deserve for their roles in the Internet ecosystem.

As I said of the Open Internet Coalition’s membership on a saltier, but still relentlessly charming, day: “[T]hese companies are losing their way. The leadership of these companies should fire their government relations staffs, disband their contrived advocacy organization, and get back to innovating and competing.”

In the fall of 2007, word emerged that Comcast had degraded the Internet traffic of some customers, whose use of a protocol called BitTorrent interfered with other Comcast customers’ Internet access.

Comcast handled it badly, and sites like TechLiberationFront covered the “Comcast Kerfuffle” extensively. Consumers prefer unfiltered access to the Internet.

By springtime, Comcast had sorted things out and made a deal with BitTorrent to develop a neutral traffic-management protocol.

Four months later, the FCC weighed in, finding that Comcast had acted badly and telling Comcast not to do that again. Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit concluded that the FCC exceeded its authority and reversed the FCC’s order against Comcast.

The court’s decision marks another turning point in the debate over whether the federal government should regulate Internet access services. What’s entertaining about it is that the problem was solved two years ago by market processes—sophisticated Internet users, a watchdog press, advocacy groups, and interested consumers communicating with one another over the Internet.

The next step will be for advocates to run to Congress, asking it to give the FCC authority to fix the problems of two years ago. But slow-moving, technologically unsophisticated bureaucrats do not know better than consumers and technologists how to run the Internet. The FCC’s “net neutrality” hopes are nothing more than public utility regulation for broadband. If they get that authority, your online experience will be a little more like dealing with the water company or the electric company and a little less like using the Internet.

As I’ve noted before, Tim Lee’s is the definitive paper. The Internet is far more durable than regulators and advocates imagine. And regulators are far less capable of neutrally arbitrating what’s in the public interest than most people realize.

The FCC doesn’t have authority to regulate the Internet. Congress and the president shouldn’t give it that authority.